A display card is a credit card sized card with a visual display panel and control button(s). A display card may be used as a payment card in order to provide cardholders with relevant information.
The display card may be programmed with various types of functionality such as a stored-value application, a credit or debit application, a loyalty application, cardholder information, etc. Although a standard credit card-sized plastic card is generally currently used for display cards, it is contemplated that a display card may also be implemented in a smaller form factor personal device, such as key fobs, PDAs, mobile phones, etc. The below description provides an example of the possible elements of a display cards.
Depending on the functionality with which the display card is programmed, the user of the card will have the ability to receive information relating to that functionality. For example, it is known to provide a balance look-up facility in display cards having financial transaction functionality.
An example of such functionality is a card having an EMV chip. EMV is the global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC, or ‘smart’ cards) and smart card enabled point of sale terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating debit and credit card transactions.
The EMV standards define the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. There are standards based on ISO/IEC 7816 for contact cards, and standards based on ISO/IEC 14443 for contactless cards. For example, ISO/IEC 7816-3 defines the transmission protocol between IC cards and their associated readers, whereby data is exchanged between the two in application protocol data units (APDUs).
In a standard EMV transaction flow, an authorization request is sent by the EMV terminal to the card Issuer, typically via Merchant, Acquirer and Trusted Network Processor (TNP) networks. The Issuer performs transaction authorization and sends an authorization response (either positive or negative) to the EMV terminal, typically via the same networks in reverse order: TNP, Acquirer and then Merchant.
With display cards, additional information flows can be included for sending information, such as updated account balance or previous transactions, for display on the card. At present, such additional information flows are processed by the Issuer alongside the authorization flow. This results in increased data traffic for the Issuer and adds a significant burden to the Issuer server.
It is an objective of the present invention to reduce the burden on the Issuer server. It is a further objective to do so using standard message flows, so as to avoid undue changes to the transaction flows. It is a yet further objective for this to be achieved so that the user is blind to the process; it is immaterial to the user by which route the displayed information has arrived at the card display, provided that its accuracy is not deleteriously affected. Another objective of the invention is to implement value added services without significantly affecting existing transaction flows.
In relation to display cards, some embodiments of information service proposition concepts are described herein with details of some embodiments of the architectures and information flows required to facilitate the provision of some embodiments of such information services.
The details of cardholder interactions with the display card (i.e. the card's user interface) and the driving of the visual display are not described in detail herein.